Writing romance.

There's only so much to add. The way he smells. The way he moves. The way he looks. The way he walks. Where they put their hands and feet and where. The devastatingly beautiful look in their eyes (what?) or the way the protagonist shivers as his fingers touch her shoulder (or something). I can't do it. I'm hopeless. High fantasy and science fiction are my genres. Not... romance. But what would a book-length story be without it? Oh, screw this. I'm going to go back to writing epic battle scenes with wizardry/plasma guns and cyborgs/shapeshifters.

HEAR THAT, GENRE CONVENTIONS? SCREW YOU FOR AS LONG AS I CAN AVOID IT.

One-Shot: Fire and Lightning (tbe)

Avalesq was made to be a carnivore, to be clever, to be cunning and crafty and conniving, to hunt down little delectable rats like this... hellhound. Hellhounds in Rannigthein, the lightning world, were the most common of the common, barring nymphs. And nymphs were... well, usually, either stupid, or downright irritatingly difficult to catch. And the stupid ones were never satisfying, didn't give him an adrenaline rush, just like eating a steak doesn't give anyone an adrenaline rush. Unless you were forced to eat it off the back of a loosely bound rabid tiger. Usually, however, that wasn't the case.
    But this one. Short and skinny, as pale as the moon with hair as red as the paint on a stop sign. And that face. He could always remember a pretty face. It wasn't the prettiness that ever caught his eye, when he became transfixed with his prey. It was the intelligence. Some people say that you can identify intelligence - it's a certain gleam in the eye, a quickness to the movement. He disagreed. You had to meet someone, make eye contact with them, watch them for more than a moment. She had seen this one in the marketplace before, had spoken with her briefly. He could see that something in her had registered his wrongness, that she was fighting an instinctive urge to run away from him. That was intelligence.
    And here she was again, as if placed here to give him a satisfying object for the chase. There were some cyrei, hellhounds, who would fight to the death in their... relatively human... form, simply because that was the one they were comfortable in. He knew, somehow, that she would do no such thing. It had to be a psychological clue - it was only ever the cyrei loyal to their hellhound shape that loped across the hills like that, that knew exactly how to take cover under trees and in the underbrush.
    He swiftly, silently, bounded up to a ridge slightly above his vantage point, in order to continue following her with his eyes. His body was much like a stag's; the legs, the body, the neck, the skull, the horns. He would have been the ultimate predator animal, completely fooling its prey, if not for the jagged carnivorous teeth that could rip a shark in half or the long, muscled serpentine tail that whipped behind him, he would have just been a deer. Just a huge, badass deer.
    He backed up quickly when she seemed to detect something through the limbs that were his cover, and he closed his glowing yellow eyes, trusting nature to camouflage everything else on his body. When he opened them again several long seconds later, she was gone.
    He picked up her scent again. She had gone... into the thinner woods. He huffed and followed, knowing that it would be more difficult to simply watch there.
    Finally, he spotted her again. She had briefly come to a kneel, examining something on the ground. He could see her eyes moving, her fingers in a fluid motion across the thin, dry grass, could practically see her heartbeat in her neck.
    He paced around her brief resting spot. When she seemed to have stopped paying attention - when she sat down, he sprung from the thickest of cover he could find.
    His teeth were so close, his hooves inches from colliding with her slight skeletal frame - she was almost too easy -
    But no. She was suddenly standing, with a long, thin iron knife in each hand, one flying and one instantly up where his throat would shortly be. He pulled back with alarm, avoiding the fatal throat slice, but not fast enough to dodge the first cut, which slid deeply into his right front leg.
    Fighting obscene curse words - he never spoke in this shape, especially during the hunt - he made a cheap shot toward her stomach, that unprotected stomach with only a single layer of white cotton between his sharp hooves and some seriously vulnerable vital organs - but again she dodged, swinging out of his reach, and made another quick jab at him, this time only two shallow cuts across his ribs which hurt nonetheless. He lunged with his teeth once again, but caught only hair, red hair that tasted like the phosphorous on the ends of matches.
    But then she was running. She seemed to have decided that a fight wasn't worth it, and off she sprinted, taking only five good steps before shedding her skin and becoming a powerful, muscular dog, exactly as Avalesq had predicted only minutes before.
    Now was the chase. His heart pounded satisfyingly as he heard his breath get heavy, his feet pound the ground. Hellhounds ran fast, but they were terrible jumpers. He simply had to corner her, or, better yet, jump just right...
    And there, he saw, in midair. He had her.
    His front hooves collided sharply with her lower back, and he heard something crack as she half-collapsed, rolled over, scrambled with her front feet, clawed the earth.
    He reached down, ready to rip her throat out. He could smell her blood from inches above her neck.
    She lit on fire, consuming the grass around her, and igniting his nose.
    He put it out quickly, but the fiery grass spread around, and he couldn't stop it. He could only try to avoid her body, which was covered in flame.
    When he reached a safe distance away, he watched the flames die out. Cyrei flames always died out - they only began at all because of the phosphorous in their hair. Not many of them could do it.
    Her hair was a pale, ashen brown now, tousled and thin. Avalesq stepped forward cautiously, leaned down to examine her face. Her eyes were shut, her breathing heavy; she was helpless, having exhausted her last line of defense. But there was something... wrong.
    He couldn't bite.
    It wasn't a matter of physical limitation. He knew that he could close his jaw on her throat and rip it out, right then and there, gracefully and deliciously. He knew he was hungry. He hadn't had a meal in a long time. He needed at least a big meal a month, and it'd been a while.
    Why couldn't he make himself do it?
    There were little voices in the back of his head, murmuring, Don't kill this girl. You need this girl. Don't kill this girl. You need this girl... Don't kill this girl. It's dangerous...
    He'd never had intuition before. These voices certainly weren't his... and he didn't trust them. There were too many powerful mental magicians in the fairy lands for him to trust an intuition he'd never had before.
    Hesitantly, he leaned forward once more and pricked the flesh just once, a little bit, with the largest and strongest of his teeth.
    An electric shock ran through him, painful and immediate. His head pounded. He felt the little bit of skin go down his esophagus and settle on the bottom of his stomach. The magic of his species took hold, immediately consuming that little bit of skin. He felt his muscular and skeletal systems grind together briefly...
    There he was - she was - a redhead cyrei, identical to his/her prey. He examined his pale fingers, his perfectly round fingernails in the shape of half-moons, his skinny ribs and his painfully dislocated pelvis, a pelvis which he immediately righted through sheer force of will. When the change finally stopped, he groaned and reverted. Always this happened, every time he ate someone. He had billions of shapes inside, ready for him to use.
    He tried again. Teeth on skin, single scrape - fierce, painful shock. He whimpered - whimpered! - and took a small step back.
    Nothing to do then. He began to walk away.
    Don't walk away, you stupid snake, the voice said. You wait for her to wake up.
    He turned back toward her, disinclined to disobey the "voice" again.

Renaissance felt the red phosphorous in her hair regenerating itself, felt her entire lower body out of alignment. She concentrated hard enough that it slid back into place. That was one of the things she had mastered, while teaching herself magic. She could fix almost any sprain or dislocation, mend any mild bruises or light cuts.
    When it was done, she registered the mild breathing by her side. Memories came rushing back - seeing an emerald-green sianach tail in the woods, trying to take it down, failing, running, firing up. She rolled onto her back and scrabbled back a foot or two, panicking, panicking, trying to will her fire phosphorous to return right then and there, but it was physically impossible...
    But no. It was the man she'd seen in the marketplace, the man who had given her the weird feeling that she had to run and hide from him.
    Sianach, she thought, connecting the dots; This man is a shapeshifter.
    "Good morning," he said. "Let's not bullshit each other. I'm Avalesq. And you are?"
    She stared at him blankly.
    "...excellent name. Now, let's get down to business: I've decided not to eat you... for now."

My weird brain, and muse.

I'm an author and artist by nature - seriously, sometimes it seems like either A) all I do is draw and write, or B) all I like to do is draw and write - and as a result, my "artistic muse" likes to manifest itself in weird forms.

Like... a year or so ago, I had a muse named Ae (or something like that). She was about ten, had blue-black hair, wore a white flannel nightgown, carried around an old brown teddy bear, and had soulless eyes. And sometimes mutilated things in a bloody fashion. The usual, you know, haunted-house-fodder, creepy little girl.

Now I have something worse. I now have a grand total of four muses.

The first is Lucas. He's blonde, occasionally snarky, and has huge white wings. He's also the kind of guy who helps tiny children off the sidewalk when they fall and scrape their knees. He's pretty much in charge of all my pretty boy characters, my heroic plots, and a good portion of my dramatic settings.

The second is... a nameless girl, I guess... right now I call her Alexa. Also blonde, really snide and sarcastic, wears bright red lipstick, smokes sometimes, has wings sometimes - aesthetically, she's basically Lucas' body double. She also has a habit of wearing Greek togas and making racist and sexist jokes (even though she's a girl - she doesn't take them to heart, I don't think). She's in charge of all of my "femme fatale" and 20s-esque characters, my bloody-but-not-gory scenes and ideas, and most of the "casually M-rated" scenes in my head such as drugs/alcohol/bad habits, sex and violence.

The third is Felix. He has dark, dark brown hair and blue eyes and nothing nonhuman to speak of (besides muse-magic, haha) - an oddity for one of my creations. He has a penchant for chocolate and also adrenaline rushes like parachuting and casual fighting. He's in charge of most emotion-charged scenes or ideas; really gorgeous detail on things like lace, embellished weapons, and wall decorations; and animal characters. He's also got his manly side, though. He's responsible for my obsession with humans themselves and muscular/skeletal anatomy... and most characters who speak any language other than English (such as my Russian-speaking Moth or my French-speaking Mehex).

The fourth, and last, is Sullivan - Felix's aesthetic female equivalent, with brown eyes and more rich brown hair, cut in a messy, spiky fashion. She's also very, very pale. She usually is wearing a uniform of some sort, and working on creating something of her own - usually mechanical. She's the closest of the four to my old Ae, just... grown up, and less bloody. She's in charge of all of my technical or mechanical drawings - robots, anatomical studies (she and Felix work together very often), clothing and costume design, a lot of character design (appearance-wise), uniforms, buildings, maps, cities, countries, civilizations, and most worldbuilding.

And right now, Sullivan and Alexa have me in their grasp. Sullivan, idea-wise, but Alexa content-wise... that make any sense? I want a world to unfold in my mind and perhaps in my writing, thanks to Sully, but Alexa demands bloody artwork right now.

Butter toffee and syncretist religion.

That's what tonight has been all about. School wears on me, and so I ignored the professors for a day and just read a book I snagged from my grandmother's shelf - a thick paperback, a post-industrial romantic/business/hints of mystery novel called The Tea Rose by Jennifer Donnelly. I finished it this afternoon, procrastinated on my essay as long as possible, just like I am now.

I made myself some butter toffee coffee. Of course it smells more like butter toffee than it tastes - I take my "sweet" coffees (as if) just plain and black. Unusual for a fourteen-year-old girl. But I've grown to enjoy it.

So now, tonight, I finish that essay I believe I wrote about forever ago. Goodness, but it's boring - writing a Works Cited page over the eighth time, putting in signal phrases and varied sentence structures and all sorts of boring whatnots that I never have to think about when I write fiction - because fiction flows smoothly from my brain. So prettily. So fast. So... energetic. But school is just... forced. I have no passion for what I'm writing. Just persistence - a teeth-gritting, furrowed-brow persistence.

(Goodness, it's late. Phys-Ed is going to be hellish tomorrow.)

I feel an idea in my brain. It's sprouted from an old, old idea and an old, old, OLD character that I've made anew, and now it wants to grow. But all the schoolwork is crowding out its light and its food and its water and it can't get out, and it'll fester and die in there.

That's why I always start to falter near the end of the school year. Springtime brings me ideas - the heavy misery of cold, cold winter ends, finally, and ideas begin to form, but all of my responsibilities consume the time I need to bring them to fruition. Fuck.

If I finish this essay and I'm not tired, I'll write about a writing program I want to get into, then about a boy I can't stop arguing with (the asshat). And then, I'll sleep, like my creative, creative soul EVENTUALLY needs to do, no matter how much it protests.

Ah, and yes, that was sarcasm. Or it wasn't... to be honest, I'm too frayed to be able to tell, at the moment.

Nothing to write and less to do.

"Severine is nothing like you. She isn't really very cool: she blends into crowds, she hangs out on the fringes at parties, and wearing shades after dark makes her run into things. She may have sometimes thought that she was special, or destined for greater things, but probably dismissed the idea as a fantasy. She's come in for her share of hurt, but gotten off with minor damage. And she's gotten no slack from you.

In general, you care deeply about Severine, but you're smart enough to let her stand on her own, without burdening her with your personal fantasies or propping her up with idealization and over-dramatization. Severine is a healthy character with a promising career ahead of her.



Score Breakdown
Do I Know This Guy? 3
You Mean Plaid Is Out? 9
I'm Destined For What? 3
Can't Complain 4
Momma HATES Her! 0
Total: 19"

-Katfeete.net

So instead of me writing something, you get this Mary Sue test for my character Severine.